By Svea Herbst-Bayliss
NEW YORK, May 27 (Reuters) – Chip design software maker Synopsys has reached an agreement with activist investor Elliott Investment Management that will give one board seat to the activist investor’s managing partner Jesse Cohn, the company said on Wednesday.
Synopsys, which has a market valuation of about $100 billion and counts Tesla and Google parent Alphabet among its customers, has held discussions with Elliott, one of the industry’s most powerful activists, for roughly two months.
Elliott pushed the company to improve its margins and Synopsys’ stock price has climbed roughly 20% since Elliott’s involvement became public. The hedge fund built a multi-billion dollar investment in the company and initially suggested that it wanted three board seats, sources familiar with the matter said.
Sunnyvale, California-based Synopsys has for decades been one of the main suppliers to Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia and others of software used in determining how to arrange the tens of billions of transistors that make up semiconductor chips.
Nvidia in December revealed it had invested $2 billion in Synopsys as part of an expanded multi-year tie-up to jointly develop new tools for designing products across industries using Nvidia’s AI technology.
(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
